Robert W. Scheifler
Abstract
An overview of the X Window System is presented, focusing on the system substrate and the low-level facilities provided to build applications and to manage the desktop. The system provides high-performance, high-level, device-independent graphics. A hierarchy of resizable, overlapping windows allows a wide variety of application and user interfaces to be built easily. Network-transparent access to the display provides an important degree of functional separation, without significantly affecting performance, which is crucial to building applications for a distributed environment. To a reasonable extent, desktop management can be custom-tailored to individual environments, without modifying the base system and typically without affecting applications.
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Index Terms
- The X window system
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Reviews
Gerard J. Holzmann
This is the first major publication on the X window system, and as such is required reading for anyone working in the field. The system was developed at MIT and provides virtual terminal interfaces to users. It is written in C and has been ported to a great variety of machines and systems. It seems most popular, however, under UNIX operating systems. One of the strongest points of the system is the focus on device independence. Display windows can be opened and maintained transparently across a local area network. The base system is defined by an asynchronous byte-stream network protocol. The paper describes the underlying network model and the high-level primitives for manipulating a hierarchy of window structures in a device-independent manner. Some of the design criteria that are mentioned are as follows: :9BThe system should be implementable on a variety of displays; it must be network transparent; it should support text, 2-D graphics, and imaging; and it must be extensible. It should support a hierarchy of resizable, overlapping windows, and must be capable of supporting different application and management interfaces. Applications for the system must be device-independent. Multiple applications must be able to maintain their displays concurrently, and any single application must be able to use many windows at once. The paper is quite long, and it is not easy to discover an overall structure. It describes the design of X in four main areas: system software, the programming interface, the output structure, and the input structure. The system model is a conventional client-server model. For each physical display there is a server process that communicates with the client (application) process over a reliable duplex byte stream. The output structure is a hierarchy of windows. Windows are meant to be cheap enough to be used even to build, for instance, menu lists or individual items in forms and spreadsheet programs. The section on input structure deals with the keyboard, the mouse, and the inevitable race conditions that can happen if concurrently active multiple windows must share the usage of these. The X system is an important piece of software. The paper describes it well.
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